Chemistry: A Short Story - Part One

Here’s some fiction—or at least my memory of it is so fuzzy the facts have become blurred with fantasy.

You can't tell teenagers anything.

That's because we think we will live forever. By the time we realize that's not true, we're older, in which case we're not teenagers anymore. Or we're dead, and we can't know anything, or at least we're not in a state of being that qualifies as being a teenager any longer. In any case, quod erat demonstrandum – as my geometry teacher used to say – you can't tell teenagers anything.

I don't know how I got on the subject of geometry when I intended to talk about chemistry. Chemistry was my best subject in high school, and I don't mean the hormonal kind, although I worked pretty hard at that, too. No, I'm talking real chemical bonds, the molecular kind, not the body-locking, fluid-swapping kind, although that aspect came into play eventually.

Her name was Elizabeth Bressler – with a last name to match those nicely rounded, perfectly developed breasts of hers – but I'll touch on those, I mean, come back to her, later, and the chemistry we shared.

It all started because, in the chemistry department, I was ahead of my time, literally. I had transferred into the Baltimore school system from suburban Chicago, only to find that the beer-swilling crab crunchers of my new home were on a totally different academic program from the beer-swilling sausage stuffers I'd left behind. In my four-year high school back on the verge of the Windy City, high school ran four years – freshman, sophomore, junior, senior – and so did the science curriculum – biology, chemistry, physics, and Advance Placement science, or AP. AP was a college-level course in one of the other three sciences so you could get a head start becoming a big man on campus. But in the Baltimore system, junior high ran three rather than two years, leaving only three for high school – sophomore, junior, senior. And so the science courses ran in parallel – biology, chemistry, physics – with no AP even possible. So when I transferred as a sophomore who had already completed freshman biology, I was a year ahead, at least in science. They put me in chemistry class, as I expected, but with a roomful of juniors. So I'd skipped a grade without doing anything, like it must be to fall through a wormhole in space and end up on the other side of the galaxy without having to waste any of your precious proton-drive fuel.

My new lab partners were a couple of seniors (the killer couple, I called them, and her knockers were not bad either) who complained almost immediately to the teacher, a dyspeptic Scotsman named Mr. Maxwell, that I was not of their caliber. I hadn't been taught to wash out beakers properly (according to his rules). And what was worse, I didn't respond to direction (namely, theirs) – which actually further reinforces my contention that you can't tell teenagers anything.

So cranky Maxwell called me into his office and informed me that my fellow lab rats had ratted me out. Shape up, he told me, or you're getting reassigned. People apparently don't like people who skip a grade without earning it, especially if they then brag about it and compound the insult by comparing the cheap, Army-surplus lab gear furnished by the state of Maryland to the shiny, class-A gear they give you in the enlightened state of Illinois. Me, I didn't see the point of his threatening to remove me from their sway. Maybe he'd reassign me to somebody I could taunt and dominate. There were plenty of rats in the room, and some of them looked downright cuddly and cute in their fuzzy sweaters, although I'd not yet had an older woman.

Not that I said all this to Maxwell in so many words. I was missing the point, he said. He'd assigned me to the two top students in the school (yes, the killer couple), and I should count myself damned lucky. Because, he said, they are not only his star students, but they are also his specially appointed lab assistants – meaning, they get certain janitorial and paperwork chores around the lab – and they grade all the tests and papers he assigns.

Point taken. So getting bumped off the starting lineup with the killer couple would cost more than just ego points. With them wielding the red pencil, I could forget about scoring bonuses on any exam or extra credit on any paper for the rest of the semester.

Read more